How many Lionel Atwill movies do you own?  It turns out I own 15, although a good deal of those aren’t Lionel Atwill movies per se but just movies with Lionel Atwill in them.  The British born (in 1885) stage and silent film actor was a sensation on the boards but he was a rare theatrical actor eager to make a go of the movies.  His film career looked promising in the early years of the sound era (Paramount paired him with the mighty Marlene Dietrich for Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 romantic costumer THE SONG OF SONGS and Josef von Sternberg’s THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN two years later) but as he approached 50 and his aquiline good looks coarsened with encroaching age, his stock fell considerably… leaving him little recourse but to cash in on his Machiavellian qualities as alternating heavies and red herrings in the glut of fright flicks being cranked out by Hollywood during “the Golden Age of Horror.”

Growing up with a love of the Universal horror movies (which I caught via late night double feature broadcasts from a small TV Station in Needham, Massachusetts), Lionel Atwill crossed my radar screen very early on.  I think one of the reasons Atwill stood out to me at the age of 12 or so was that he wasn’t exotic like Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi or Peter Lorre or John Carradine… he seemed more like a bank president than a butcher, kind of four-square and a bit stuffy.  But that only made things more interesting when he went off the deep end, when he got that point-of-no-return look in his eyes and he smiled that awful atavistic smile.  While Karloff and company were white hot in their incandescent lunacy, Atwill was cold.  Whether playing a good guy (as he turns out to be in DOCTOR X) or a villain (pick ‘em… I like his textbook mad scientist in snowboarder’s goggles in MAN MADE MONSTER), Lionel Atwill would never be mistaken for one of the boys.

“One of the most dignified and diabolical of the mad scientists was Lionel Atwill,” wrote film historian William K. Everson in The Bad Guys: A Pictorial History of of the Movie Villain (Cadillac Publishing Co., 1964).  “All such scientists had two basic lines of dialogue, and Atwill delivered them on more than one occasion.  The first was when the heroine rather tactlessly accused him of being mad, and Atwill would reply with a ‘Mad?  Of course I’m mad!’ – and launch into a tirade wherein he listed all of the other great scientists – from Galileo to Pasteur – who had been thought mad because they were ahead of their time.  And the second block-busting line would be when he’d grab the heroine in the climactic reel, and, just before strapping her to his apparatus, would cheer her up with ‘Think of it, my dear! I offer you eternal life.’”

Growing up a child of affluence in Croydon, England, Lionel Alfred William Atwill (nicknamed ‘Pinky’ for the red tinge of his hair) had considered a career in medicine but was working in a surveyor’s office with an aim toward becoming an architect when he was lured away from the promise of steady income by the siren’s call of the theatrical arts.  After serving his apprenticeship at London’s Garrick Theater and in Australian tours, Atwill crossed the Atlantic in 1915 to tour the United States with Lillie Langtry in Mrs. Thompson.  The production was a disaster but Atwill persevered and made it to Broadway, where he staged and acted in a production of The Lodger (a full decade before Hitchcock’s silent screen adaptation) at New York’s Bandbox Theater in January of 1917.  Atwill was Julius Caesar to Helen Hayes’ Cleopatra in Caesar and Cleopatra in 1925, appeared with Russian diva Alla Nazimova in a trio of Ibsen plays performed in repertory and appeared opposite Fanny Brice and Louise Brooks in the notorious Broadway flop Fioretta in 1929.  The New York Times devoted a feature to Atwill as early as 1918 (“The Rise of Lionel Atwill”) and he appeared with his second wife in a highly publicized pictorial in Vanity Fair in 1921, in conjunction with his vaudefille tour of The White Faced Fool.

While many of Atwill’s most prestigious productions amounted to disappointing box office and short runs, he had a bona fide hit on his hands with the 1924 production of Dorothy Brandon’s The Outsider, in which he played Anton Ragatsky, a disreputable surgeon who cures the paralysis of a young girl deemed untreatable by the medical community.  (Atwill revived the character in a revival in 1928.)  Certainly, this role set the stage for countless quack medicos to populate Atwill’s curriculum vitae through the next two decades.  Atwill traveled to Hollywood in 1932 to reprise his stage triumph as a passion murderer’s complicit father in 20th Century Fox’s SILENT WITNESS (onscreen son Bramwell Fletcher would laugh himself to death as the first victim of THE MUMMY in 1933) and, fascinated by the technical ingenuity of filmmaking (and tired of producing honorable failures in New York), decided to stay on in the West.  His next role was as the chilly clinician Dr. Xavier in First National’s DOCTOR X (1932), which was filmed in two-strip technicolor and costarred Fay Wray.  Atwill would play characters of every stripe through the next fifteen years, until his death from lung cancer in 1946 – but it was his villains who made him immortal.  Cleared of the charge of cannibalism by the fade-out of DOCTOR X, he was caught red handed as the twisted brain behind THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1932) and his villainy knew no bounds in THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933),  and THE SPHINX, and MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933).  Even in non-horror films he could be a right bastard, as in THE MAN WHO RECLAIMED HIS HEAD (1935) and CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935), in which he makes the fatal mistake of torturing but not killing buccaneer Errol Flynn.  Atwill was also a memorable Professor Moriarty, superbad nemesis to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON (1942).

It was Atwill’s brilliance as a baddie that gave his often flatly-written good guy roles added zest, as in Tod Browning’s MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935) and as the one-armed Inspector Krogh in THE SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939).  Few actors could deliver a line like “”One doesn’t easily forget, Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots!” and still sound classy.  A peek at Atwill’s IMDb page shows a fury of film work between 1940 and his death on April 22, 1946, but a resume doesn’t tell a life story.  Although he had amassed a personal fortune and lived lavishly in a 15-room mansion in the Pacific Palisades, Atwill leapfrogged from one failed marriage to another and developed a reputation in Hollywood for hosting lavish degenerate parties, often branded as “orgies,” one of which resulted in a criminal trial (reminiscent of the case that destroyed silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle).  On the witness stand, Atwill refused to name names in regard to a sexual assault that was alleged to have occurred at one of his parties and was charged with perjury.  Blackballed within the film community, he found only minor parts available to him at Universal, bigger roles in the poorer product of Poverty Row.  Adding to his misfortune was the death of his son, John Arthur Atwill, in combat in 1941.  To escape his troubles, Atwill traveled to England to tour several theatrical productions, among them yet another staging of The Outsider, a title that likely had a whole new meaning to him.  In 1943, the industry ban against Atwill was lifted.  The following year, he married for the fourth time.  He was at work on the Universal serial LOST CITY OF THE JUNGLE when he succumbed to pneumonia secondary to lung cancer, at the age of 61.